phase of the moon n.
Used humorously as a random parameter
on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies
unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems
to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine.
"This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode,
having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See
also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that
really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little
subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at
MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS
incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote
out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long.
Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long
and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later
read back in the program would barf. The length of the first
line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of
the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the
bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included
an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug,
but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been
described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN
(European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors
in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the
formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily
processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people
suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the
moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error
turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the
27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of
the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered
physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and
as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical
laws to the most modern science.
Used humorously as a random parameter
on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies
unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems
to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to determine.
"This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode,
having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See
also heisenbug.
True story: Once upon a time there was a program bug that
really did depend on the phase of the moon. There was a little
subroutine that had traditionally been used in various programs at
MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS
incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote
out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long.
Very occasionally the first line of the message would be too long
and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later
read back in the program would barf. The length of the first
line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of
the phase specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the
bug literally depended on the phase of the moon!
The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included
an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug,
but the typesetter `corrected' it. This has since been
described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.
However, beware of assumptions. A few years ago, engineers of CERN
(European Center for Nuclear Research) were baffled by some errors
in experiments conducted with the LEP particle accelerator. As the
formidable amount of data generated by such devices is heavily
processed by computers before being seen by humans, many people
suggested the software was somehow sensitive to the phase of the
moon. A few desperate engineers discovered the truth; the error
turned out to be the result of a tiny change in the geometry of the
27km circumference ring, physically caused by the deformation of
the Earth by the passage of the Moon! This story has entered
physics folklore as a Newtonian vengeance on particle physics and
as an example of the relevance of the simplest and oldest physical
laws to the most modern science.
Related:
- bug n.
An unwanted and unintended property of a program or
piece of hardware,
esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym... - Always be aware of the phase of
the moon... - Moon, n.:
1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to
hackers.
See PHASE OF THE MOON. 2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC)... - moon, n:
1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to
hackers.
See PHASE OF THE MOON. 2. Dave Moon (MOON@MC)... - phase
1. n. The offset of one's waking-sleeping schedule
with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle;
a useful concept among people who often work at... - phase: 1. n. The offset of one's waking-sleeping schedule with
respect to the standard 24-hour cycle;
a useful concept among people who often work at... - The phase of the moon is bad,
causing a fatal disk crash...
From the same category:
- Death Square n.
The corporate logo of Novell, the people
who acquired USL after AT&T let go of it (Novell eventually sold
the Unix group to SCO).
Coined by analogy with Death Star, ... - garbage collect vi.
(also `garbage collection',
n.) See GC... - security through obscurity
(alt. `security by obscurity')
A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of
coping with security holes -
namely, ignoring them, documenting ... - newbie /n[y]oo'bee/ n.
[verry common; orig. from
British public-school and military slang variant of `new boy'] A
Usenet neophyte.
This term surfaced in the newsgroup talk.bizarre... - hackish /hak'ish/ adj.
(also hackishness n.) 1. Said
of something that is or involves a hack.
2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture...
